Just the right amount of humor to mask the underlying despair. ( )

It has always been good to be a dog in my family. We often love them more than people. Like us, J.R. Ackerley famously loved his own dog furiously so it is not surprising that he would write a novel that uses a dog as a major plot driver in his queer classic, We Think the World of You.

Frank is a middle aged, middle class civil servant. He is in love with Johnny, a good looking working class man who has just been sent to prison for stealing. When he first visits Johnny in prison, Johnny asks Frank to look after his German Shepherd, Evie, but Frank refuses, leaving the beautiful dog to be neglected and ignored by Johnny's parents. As Frank engages in a passive aggressive bid for permission to visit Johnny, vying with Johnny's parents and wife, he falls for the dog, spending much of his emotional energy on trying to rescue her from Johnny's family.

None of the characters here are likable. Frank condescends to Johnny's family, never realizing that they (and Johnny himself) do not in fact, think the world of him, but are using him for financial gain. Every last character is less likable than Evie, who is definitely pitiable and misused by everyone around her. There is definite social commentary here on the lives of working class Britons but the characters are all seen through Frank's eyes so they are in fact little better than stereotypes; even Johnny, who he professes to love, comes across as a bit of a careless dimwit. The female characters are terrible and it's hard to say whether that's Frank's misogyny or indeed Ackerley's. Others have found humor in the telling but I missed that entirely. I'd have felt sorry for Frank, who Johnny basically used as a bottomless wallet, if he hadn't also been such a snob. The writing is very well done but the book as a whole was dull, populated as it was by hateful, opportunistic characters. ( )

'a fairy story for adults'
By sally tarbox on 8 Jan. 2013
Format: Hardcover
Absolute gem of a book set in London just after World War 2.
Middle class Frank is visiting his lover, Johnny, as he begins a year in prison. From the start we feel Frank is being used; he ends up helping out Johnny's unpleasant wife and children. As he visits Johnny's parents, he begins to get concerned about his friend's dog, Evie, which has been billetted on them, along with one of the children. The tension in the book as he tries to get custody of the poor animal which is kept inside for weeks at a time and beaten becomes almost unbearable. Although members of the family often utter the refrain 'we think the world of her', Johnny later observes:

'She guessed, as I now did, what that world amounted to, and that what he had just done for us...was the most she would ever get, and that she could not count even on that.'

A quick read (155 pages) but absolutely unputdownable. ( )

A dog. A man enthralled. A pioneer in the world of power manifesting itself as indistinguishable from the mundane. ( )

This is the story of Frank, a well-bred, middle-aged civil servant who lusts after Johnny, a married, poorly educated working class young man who occasionally gets on the wrong side of the law. When Johnny is sent to jail for a year, Frank gets caught in a struggle with Johnny's wife and parents for custody of Johnny's dog Evie. This is obviously a humorous book, and although there are undercurrents of class warfare and gay rights, the focus is on Evie, an irresistible character who steals the show. This is a quick read, and one I fully recommend. ( )